Today, many unmanned vehicles include control systems that allow them to perform autonomous or semi-autonomous tasks. Some of these vehicles are able to gather information regarding their environment, potential threats and potential targets to make decisions and control the actions of the vehicle. Additionally, many manned vehicles include control systems that perform functions with little or no direction from the pilot.
In circumstances where multiple systems, each having a measure of autonomous control, must be coordinated to work together, a number of issues may arise. For example, one conventional model is to give a single entity centralized control, such as in the case of a ship launching missiles. The ship processes information on potential targets and assigns targets to the missiles. However, this system has substantial drawbacks. First, since all missiles are controlled from a single source, the destruction of the centralized source generally results in a loss of ability for the missiles to engage their target(s). Second, in order to adequately direct missiles to targets, the centralized source must typically collect and maintain data on both the missiles and the potential targets, which may be impractical or otherwise time consuming in certain applications. Finally, a centralized control system may be inappropriate in situations where the central hub is too far displaced to adequately direct the controlled vehicles.
One solution to the issues arising from the centralized control of autonomous or semi-autonomous agents in cooperative engagement of targets is to distribute the control to the agents. That is, the agents themselves negotiate and determine which targets they will engage. Such a system helps to eliminate some of the problems associated with controlling the agents from a central source; however, this type of distributive control presents a number of problems. One of the problems facing distributive control is the management of which agents will be assigned to various targets. For example, an “auction” scheme of control, where various agents submit bids to a central “auctioneer” to determine which one should be assigned the target, presents the same bottleneck problem as that of the centralized control system discussed vide supra. Furthermore, in such an auctioning system, the amount of information that must be transferred between the agents and negotiation of bids that must occur generally will be impractical or otherwise burdensome in many situations.